


pour away despair and rinse the cup

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Bittersweet, Dreams, Friendship, Gen, Light Angst, Slice of Life, but it's kirkwall so. you know.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:40:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24900088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: In the three years before the Qunari situation boils over, life happens.
Relationships: Female Hawke & Everyone
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	pour away despair and rinse the cup

Spring is the worst season in Kirkwall—might be the worst season in the Free Marches, as far as Hawke knows—because even when she’s in Darktown she keeps expecting to hear Bethany sneeze at the flowers, keeps turning to poke fun at Carver’s reddened eyes. The twins always had more issues with allergies than she did, even back in Lothering.

It’s funny, what you miss about people.

Carver’s letter sits on the table in her room, secreted away under notes on Isabela’s relic and the current tally of who owes what from the last game of Wicked Grace. She’d given Mother his hellos and lied about asking him to write her. She can’t bring herself to ask Carver to do anything. She can’t bring herself to give the letter to Mother.

She  _ can  _ bring herself to drain the mug Norah brings her, tucked away in the corner of the tavern. From this seat she’s as much in the shadows as she can be, able to catch a glimpse of Isabela or hear the familiar cadence of Varric telling a story. 

“You alright, then?” Norah asks her as she swaps out the empty mug for a full one. “Not like you to drink alone.”

Bethany is four years dead today. Hawke tilts her ale in a toast to the room, unsmiling, and passes Norah a silver.

“No more questions, got it.”

This time of night, when Mother’s sleeping in the estate and the fires are starting to get low even in the Hanged Man—meaning Corff’s one brawl from kicking everyone out, unlike the usual three—at this time of year, means Hawke’s best described as—

“Brooding, lovely?” Isabela slips neatly into the chair beside her, puts a hand on her knee.

“Don’t let Varric hear you say it, he’s particular about nicknames.”

“He’d let you get away with anything,” she argues, before relenting. Conversation can be quick like this, with Isabela. A challenge here, a jab there; ever the duelist. 

“I don’t want to fight tonight,” Hawke says, before bringing a hand to her mouth. Too honest, that was too honest. She passes her drink to the pirate. 

“Alright,” Isabela allows, taking a gulp. “Want to do something else?”

“Not feeling very  _ fun,  _ ‘Bela.”

“Come back to my room anyway. We’ll do something boring; you can braid my hair while we figure it out.” At that she finishes the drink, stands, and offers her hand.

She’s a very persuasive person; Hawke regrets ever mentioning braiding her sister’s hair. Isabela doesn’t forget a secret, even if it’s just offered while they’re hiking along the coast gathering elfroot, and she talks about Bethany so rarely that everything about her might as well be a secret. 

So Hawke spends the night in her room, talking through a four part braid that neither of them really has long enough hair for. At some point Isabela pulls out a box of battered locks and starts teaching her to pick them in turn, a story for each one she manages to get open.

“You have quick hands, for a mage,” she says at one point. “And you never know when you’ll need this.”

The pirate doesn’t give a lot of presents; Hawke folds the night away in her heart, letting it nestle right next to the scar that is Bethany. Neither of them talk about the tight clench of her jaw, the hand she scrubs across her eyes when she ties the end of Isabela’s braid.

“Allergies, you know,” she mutters, and Isabela lets it lie.

\---

Merrill clicks her tongue when Hawke staggers into her home, fingers numb from poison and arm stinging from the lucky jab the Invisible Sister got in.

“You ought to go to Anders for healing,” she reminds her, hands already starting to glow. “He gets grumpy when you don’t.”

Merrill’s magic is wild, tastes of growing things. She wraps the healing spell around Hawke, drawing the poison out with calm competence. Anders would ask questions, would say something about danger and the city and Hawke just can’t deal with it tonight, and Merrill doesn’t ask anything at all.

“You make me think of spring,” Hawke chokes out, feeling coming back to her hands in needle-pricks, “you’re like a living thing.”

“Oh, lethallan,” she sighs, “you’re alive too.”

And she puts a cup in Hawke’s unsteady hands and makes her drink it, lukewarm water cut through with the astringent taste of elfroot. And she tells a story of the clan; an old story that lives on the Sundermount and here in Merrill’s house and in her blood in a way Hawke can imagine but never understand. But the story acts as a salve, Merrill’s voice moving in tandem with her slim fingers, mending the cut on her arm and trying to mend something deeper.

The estate in Hightown feels far too much like a tomb; she’s been having dreams of Father looking through her books, of Bethany sat at the breakfast table with Bodahn and Sandal. Spring’s awful, for dreaming, and Kirkwall’s already a terrible city to dream in. 

There’s something wrong with it all, with the city and with her, but when Merrill’s talking about Asha’bellanar and the sun-dragon, Hawke can forget.

\---

Summer is the shine of sunlight on Isabela’s necklace, is the smell of the sea, is an unspoken goodbye. Isabela wears her admiral’s hat and calls orders to her crew and Hawke, on the docks of Kirkwall, watches her sail away. Sometimes, in the dreams, they’re on the deck together. Sometimes the sun beats down and it’s just the two of them and a too-large ship crashing over the waves, sailing far and away. 

Usually, though, Hawke dreams of shipwrecks and a cramped space below decks, stuffed full of refugees. Mother and Carver and Aveline, all leaning against each other as Marian stares up through the grating at an uncaring sky. She's not much of a sailor.

(“Marian,” Isabela says, teasing, and she knows it’s a dream because no one uses her first name anymore.)

Summer in Kirkwall is hot and sticky and stinks to high heaven. Hawke is more restless than she means to be, awake at odd hours from the heat that the city groans under. She comes out of sleep and wastes candles sitting at her desk with her journals, trying to capture the glint of Flemeth’s old eyes and the crushing weight of the amulet in her hand, the sound Carver made when he stepped back and pretended not to.

She writes more in the summer, writes more than she ever did living in Gamlen’s house and more than she did in Lothering. It’s like it’s bleeding out of her, like she’s a leaky bucket. Varric mentioned it two days ago, the ink on her fingers. She’d laughed it off and made a joke about grimoires that had let him tell another story.

In the summer he comes alive; more people keep late hours, meaning a larger audience in the Hanged Man at the end of the day. Varric, she’s come to understand, needs an audience. If that’s all he needs, she’s happy to provide.

Sometimes he flips the script, though, and she’s not a fan of that.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, on the long hike up to the Bone Pit. 

“What makes you think something’s wrong? Besides the,” she gestures in the direction of the mine.

“You’re quiet, that’s all.” She doesn’t have to turn around to know he’s watching her.

“Not sleeping well,” she mutters. Kirkwall’s a terrible city to dream in. The Fade twists strangely, says her name too often. It stirs up old memories more often than not, and Hawke hates old memories.

“Bad dreams?”

“And good ones. Too many of them in general.” 

“You can tell me about it, if you want,” he offers, and she laughs. “No, I mean it. You can tell me and I won’t tell anyone, if that’s how you want it.”

What’s she supposed to say to that?  _ I want my sister to be alive  _ is too heavy and  _ I want my brother back  _ is right out. They don’t talk about brothers.  _ Hi Varric, I’m dreaming about the Witch of the Wilds but it’s probably not anything to worry about, also do you think there are delayed side effects to resurrecting someone?  _ would go over like a ton of bricks.

“I’m not a very good sailor,” she starts, voice a little unsteady. By the time they reach the giant spiders, she’s talked herself hoarse.

None of his stories ever mention it.

\---

In autumn, Merrill teaches her a glyph of her own design that supposedly helps keep nightmares away. Isabela brings the awful poetry from their last hunt for the relic and they read it in outrageous voices, laughing so loud that Mother comes into the kitchen to listen. 

Aveline comes by with a huge pumpkin, given to her by a grateful produce merchant after she busted up a protection racket in the Lowtown market, and they slice it and roast the seeds and eat various preparations of pumpkin for four days. It’s as close as they get to a harvest—things are different in Kirkwall, where there’s far more trade and far less farming—but it feels right. 

Her birthday comes in the middle of Harvestmere and they all come out of the woodwork, her friends, to spend an evening being painfully civil to each other while Mother presides over the dinner table. There’s cake, it’s nice. It’s nice.

Feynriel shows up in her dreams, in autumn. He lingers at the edges, stays outside the hazy doors; she has to go out and meet him. And he talks about life with the Dalish and asks after his mother, troubled even when she promises to check on her. Even in the Fade, there are dark circles under his eyes.

Hawke’s heart aches, in autumn, and even though she gets more sleep Kirkwall remains a terrible city to dream in. Or outside of, apparently. She thinks of the spark in Flemeth’s eyes, her warning of a precipice. Maybe all of this will tumble down, someday, and she’ll miss the moment when she’s meant to leap.

(It’s autumn when she comes to Skyhold, half a dozen years later. She still doesn’t know when the moment’s supposed to be.

The castle is...  _ impressive,  _ if you like that sort of thing. Hawke is not impressed. 

The air is too crisp, the people too devoted—the Inquisitor wants to know about Corypheus but all Hawke can see is the pedestal the Inquisition is, the pyre it will become. She can’t tell if the Inquisitor believes the stories being told, Andraste and the will of the Maker, but that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters here is getting Varric to leave.

Skyhold is a funny place to dream; the spirits are very near, here. Hawke dreams of conversations she’s had and conversations she hasn’t, dreams of Bethany joining the mages in the tower here, of Carver falling in with the soldiers. 

Anyway, Varric. Leaving the Inquisition. Convincing Varric to leave the Inquisition.

It won’t work, she knows, because he has a good heart and is a good man, is devoted to his friends and his stories. Still, she wants to steal him back from this, wants to make her hands into snares and catch him like a rabbit, drag him out of the fortress the way he dragged her to the Kirkwall docks and put her on Isabela’s ship. She’s not supposed to be the selfish one—she never is, in the stories he tells—but she wants to hide him away from this thing he’s building. 

All of this, the pomp and circumstance and the drive of the Inquisition—it can’t last, and it’ll break his heart when it ends. (Or he’ll be fine, Varric Tethras, professional younger brother, untouchable in his chair at the Hanged Man as he weaves a tale that can pull a whole city down. Maybe he’ll go back to greasing palms of guards and gangs, disappearing problems—maybe he’ll walk into her house and invite her to a game of Wicked Grace, like she’s still there. Maybe in the story he tells, she will be.)

“In the Fade you must believe nothing but yourself,” the boy with the large hat says, as she’s fiddling with a lockpick and watching Varric talk to a room full of people.

“Merrill told me that.”

“I know.” He tilts his head to the side and she gets a glimpse of his pale eyes. “It’s important. Like pumpkin seeds.”

“You’re strange,” she says, and the memory of Kirkwall makes her smile.)

\---

Winter is a quiet season in Kirkwall and Hawke dreams of Lothering sleeping under a blanket of snow. She dreams of the sparkle under the weak sun, the way her sister shoved it down the back of her collar in retaliation for a snowball thrown at Carver. She dreams of Father’s lumpy scarf, so carefully knitted by her own unskilled hands. He’d smiled and called it the finest Wintersend gift he’d ever received, wrapped the crimson wool around his neck. Mother called it dashing, she remembers.

That it doesn’t snow in Kirkwall is a good thing. Instead it just gets colder, sharp winds roaming through the more deserted streets. 

In the third week of Haring, the Viscount summons her and orders her to talk to the Arishok. Apparently, someone’s stolen the formula for gaatlok.

By the time First Day passes, there are no more quiet seasons in Hawke’s life.

**Author's Note:**

> title for this fic comes from Edna St. Vincent Millay's _Sonnet 139_ which is one of my favorite poems at the moment. this takes place mostly during/before act two because that’s my favorite act. i just think about the companions taking care of hawke and i feel a lot, okay, everybody's going through their own stuff let's get y'all some soup, kirkwall is such a mess and i love it so much.  
> my first time posting anything for dragon age, and i hope it was a good read! i really love these games and i really love da2 in particular even though i haven't gone back and played it for a few years, and i hope that this was fun for you.  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think!


End file.
